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Your next favorite book
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From the international best-selling author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 comes this chilling dystopian fable for fans of Netflix's Squid Game.
In a country called Town, a doctor named Su is found dead in an abandoned car. There is only one place the police intend to look for her suspected killer: the Saha Estates.
Controlled by a secretive organization of ministers, Town is the safest, richest nation in the world. But it is a society clearly divided into the haves and have-nots, and those who have the very least―who aren't even considered citizens―live on the Saha Estates. Residents of Saha must squat in moldy units without plumbing or electricity and can only find work doing harsh labor. For many, the apartment complex is a bleak haven for escaping even bleaker pasts―as it was for Jin-kyung and her brother, Do-Kyung, who showed up one day sopping wet and shivering.
No one is shocked when a lowlife like Do-Kyung becomes the main suspect in Su's―a citizen's―murder. But then Do-Kyung disappears. Isolated in a barren Saha unit, Jin-Kyung makes a choice: she will finally confront a system hellbent on erasing her brother's existence. To find him, she must rely on her tightlipped neighbors, from the mysterious janitor known as "Old Man," to Granny Konnim, the community gardener and reluctant midwife, to Woomi, an unwitting test subject at the local clinic. On her quest for the truth, Jin-kyung will uncover a reality far darker than she could have imagined.
Written in Cho Nam-Joo's signature sharp prose, brilliantly translated by Jamie Chang, Saha is a chilling portrait of what happens when we finally unmask our oppressors.
"What is it called again when dystopian fiction seems too uncomfortably plausible: Horror? Speculative fiction? A wake-up call? Treading in territories visited over time by Dickens, Orwell, Atwood, Ishiguro, Squid Game, and Parasite, Cho recounts―in specific and painstaking detail―the miserable lives endured by the many residents of the Saha housing complex...This successor to Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (2020), Cho's chronicle of the misogynistic forces behind South Korea's #MeToo movement―a finalist for the National Book Award―addresses another equally corrosive social horror. Read. Weep. Learn." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] nuanced dystopian tale...Though the big picture remains elusive, Cho's close-ups consistently captivate, and the author has an easy hand capturing her characters' spirit. Fans of Squid Game will be drawn to the author's grim vision." - Publishers Weekly
"Cho Nam-Joo's Saha is its own Orwellian vision: bleak and berserk, brilliant, and beautiful." - Oprah Daily
This information about Saha was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Cho Nam-joo was born in 1978 in Seoul, South Korea. She graduated from the Department of Sociology of Ehwa Women's University, and was a television scriptwriter for nine years. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is her third novel, and was based partly on her own experience as a woman who quit her job to stay at home after giving birth to a child. It has had a profound impact on gender inequality and discrimination in Korean society, and has been translated into 18 languages. Cho lives with her family in Seoul.
Name Pronunciation
Cho Nam-Joo: cho NAM-joo. The vowel sound in "Nam" is similar to "am."
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